That's the challenge from WWE, which has issued an open invitation to the deadlocked Democrats to settle their differences "the American way — in a wrestling match."

Seriously.

World Wrestling Entertainment aired the video invitation Tuesday, calling for a bona fide smackdown on Monday night RAW April 21.

"What we're trying to do is provide both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama an opportunity to speak to more than 8 million viewers of our program … which is the night before the Pennsylvania primary," WWE spokesman Gary Davis told FOXNews.com.

As the Fox report also noted that, "What exactly the world of professional wrestling expects Clinton and Obama to do in that ring is unclear", it seems apropos to offer up this depiction from editorial cartoonists Cox & Forkum -- nice name -- circa, AD.2007.Jul.26.EDT:

Urm... a mea culpa may be in order, too: This post is in part a dig at our gonzo mate over at Saigon's WWE (Wild, Wild East). DEC oi, it might take a while to nudge the smackdown crowd out Google's top spots on that acronym. ;)

2008-04-11

I was skeptical about even trialling twitter before. My thinking: it would just be yet another addictively time-wasting nerdy Net fad. But between the oppressive buzz twitter's still getting and seeing a box for it in the sidebar on WWE, i was actually verging on giving twitter a taste.

Then, a link to the following popped up among the 400+ RSS-feed entries in my Google Reader account this morning. Please do thank Hugh for saving me from getting duped into yet another Net-fad obsession. I haven't read his post yet. The following did indeed "say it all" for me.

Erick Schonfeld

Are you feeling Twitter overload, or just sick of hearing about it? Blogger/Cartoonist/Ad Man Hugh McLeod feels the same way. He illustrated a post titled Why I Deleted My Twitter Account with the following cartoon:

To torch a few cobwebs for any of the other oldies about, who might've actually forgotten watching this way2cool TV show way back when -- and, frighteningly, maybe even before the star of Wild Wild West, the feature-lenth flick, Will Smith (huzzah), was but a twinkle in his old man's eye:

Brown's "screed" pretty well sums up the progressive certainty i've been feeling and pondering about at least the evidence, if not the appropriate response, to the "climate crisis", after following the global warming, climate change headlines -- and even reading several of the articles, too -- since i first watched Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" last June.

To the point of how this might interest an editor at "The Organ[?!?] of the Party Committee, The Communist Party of Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh City", Sai Gon Gai Phong, well, some 80 percent of Vietnamese are among the generation(s) Brown refers to when he writes:

... frightening. When they explain that, if current trends continue, fifty years from now the next generation - by which they mean me - could easily have a sea level that is one meter higher than the present one, it's depressing. -- Huffington Post, "December 7, 2007 | 06:17 PM (EST)"

As shown in Figure..., Vietnam is the most seriously impacted by SLR: Up to 16% of its area would be impacted by a 5m SLR, making it second only to The Bahamas among countries analyzed for this paper. Most of this impact is in the Mekong and Red River Deltas. Note in Figure... that most of Vietnam's land area southwest of Ho Chi Minh City would be severely impacted by SLR.

Large percentages of Vietnam's population and economic activity are located in these two river deltas. As shown in Figures..., 10.8% of Vietnam's population would be impacted by a 1m SLR. This is the largest percentage of impacted population among all 84 countries ( A.R. of Egypt follows with 10.56%). Vietnam's impacted population would reach 35% with a 5m SLR. The impacts of SLR on Vietnam's GDP (Figure...) and urban extent (Figure...) closely follow the impact on its population.

Eleven percent of an impending 90mn population, almost 10 million people! With a 1m SLR, they'd likely be pressured at a snail's pace to move to higher ground over those 50-odd years, but in a nation already packed to the brim with people, a nation already normally hot, wet or dry, and getting hotter and wetter or drier already.

How would the nation's most practical and capable people respond?

Eighty percent of Vietnam is in the countryside and vastly more poor than the cities' rising young consumer classes. "Brother and Sister Rice", as established urbanites call them, have little chance to fully appreciate the global perspective explicit in global warming. Most of their information comes to them via limited media that's completely one-party-state controlled. And they're way too busy focusing on just keeping their fields fertile, harvesting them and getting a price they can survive better upon.

And 80 percent of Vietnam is under 45, and just getting its first glimpse of a just the decent standard of living they or their parents have already worked too hard to attain.

Thomas Tobin, the president and chief executive of HSBC (Hong Kong Shanghai Bank) Vietnam, recently summed up their prospects, as quoted in " Foreign banks encounter cultural barrier in Vietnam", by Ben Stocking, The Associated Press, at the site of the International Herald Tribune (IHT), Friday, December 14, 2007:

"Stand on the streets of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City and watch the millions of motorbikes drive past," he [Tobin] said. "Everyone has a mobile phone. Everyone is really well dressed. Every day, you see more and more people able to participate in consumerism."

How many and which of those nouveau riche, young Vietnamese consumers' dreams will they defer, or even pass up, just as they seem within their grasp? Why should they abstain from the unbridled consumerism they see in foreign films and TV news when they soon find out that most of those who can have any significant, if small, impact on reversing the climate crises are not even in their own nation, and worse, a depressingly small percentage of those overseas elite yet have any interest in doing anything significant about the impacts of climate change even in their own domains.

"It's not sinking!" uncle John is angry. Or grumpy. Or both. He has spent far too much of his life screaming logic at disinterested boobs to tolerate misphrasing. "The water is rising."

The 'it' in question is New York, specifically Manhattan.

"True, but isn't that really a matter of relativity?" I ask. "I mean, if we measure altitude in feet above sea level, then if sea level rises we're technically sinking."

"It's not sinking!" John says. Our Thanksgiving table is filled with relatively agreeable people who agree heartily on the catastrophe of carbon emissions, so in order to stir up a really good fight - an important part of any Thanksgiving - it's important to be stubborn over small details.

John's wife, Susan, interjects "Seattle is rising. The rock bed underneath it is moving the city slowly upward. Venice is sinking. Those have nothing to do with the water level."

These are people who have become so deeply embroiled in a cause that shrugging it off as yet another of the world's moral train wrecks is not an option. To them, global warming is apartheid or imperialism or slavery; anyone who can shrug and a buy an SUV is a collaborator and a villain. They are moral and dedicated people. And, like most moral and dedicated people, they make dreadful cocktail companions.

"True," I say "but look: the kilogram is defined by a block of platinum in Paris, right? So if somebody knocks that block and chips off a few molecules, everything suddenly weighs more. It's the same with sea level."

It's important to keep up these stupid arguments because otherwise John or Susan or both will talk about global warming in earnest.

The problem is that they are too distinguished. John is a scientist emeritus at Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute and Susan has her own PhD and for ten years was the president of Ecological Engineering, a wastewater management firm. Their titles carry weight, so when they say Manhattan is sinking - or, I suppose, global water levels are rising thus putting Manhattan underwater in a way that, really, has pretty much the same effect as sinking - it's frightening. As if their knowledge didn't scare me enough, they use metric units, which are terrifyingly scientific.

As the only person in the entire world who has not seen An Inconvenient Truth, I can generally avoid confronting the all-but-inevitable implications of global warming if I set my mind to it. Does this winter seem different from the winters fifteen years ago? Sure, but maybe I'm misremembering.

My aunt and uncle know the numbers. When they explain that water levels are rising about 1mm a year but that rate is accelerating, it's mildly frightening. When they explain that, if current trends continue, fifty years from now the next generation - by which they mean me - could easily have a sea level that is one meter higher than the present one, it's depressing. And when they explain that Manhattan would have to spend gobs of money on levies and water pumps or else be partially submerged, I entertain thoughts of doomsday. I like Manhattan. I live there. I would like it to remain an above-water attraction.

If science is the religion of the secular left, then global warming is our Armageddon. And like any young Baptist who believes in the rapture but isn't sure he'll pass muster, I come out of global warming sermons feeling hollow and jumpy.

John is standing now. He rose to refill his wine glass, but he is irritated so standing will do him just fine. "The kilogram's not the same. Water levels change constantly and we don't redefine the heights of mountains. And it's a dumb way to look at it. The water is rising." His tone has a note of finality to it, and he waits for me to challenge him.

Earlier in the night, John noted that his farm is a good 22 feet above sea level (in a rare scientific lapse, he didn't use meters) and thus will mostly avoid the coming flood. Honestly, this seemed smug.

My generation, our generation for those of you twenty-somethings out there, is going to be the first, by most indications, to really feel the worst effects of climate change. We will have memories of polar bears as creatures that lived in the arctic while our children will understand them as yet another in a long list of extinct species. We could easily see large parts of the Greenland ice shelf collapse into the ocean in our lifetimes. And, again, parts of Manhattan - not to mention Florida, Louisiana and Hawaii - will probably be underwater by the time I am in my seventies.

Pessimism is an unpopular sentiment in American politics, even when it seems pretty close to realism. So we won't hear much in this next election about the preposterously large global effort it would take to mitigate, much less reverse, our current climate trends. For the first time in history, China is emitting more carbon dioxide than the United States and India is closing in on us. The candidates will probably talk a fair amount about the US taking leadership in the battle against global warming. They will probably not talk about the fact that to seriously dampen carbon emissions, we will have to convince 2.6 billion people in China and India to develop a transportation system that doesn't rely on automobiles and a fuel system that doesn't rely on petroleum, and that's assuming we can begin to steer our own people in the same direction.

It's not, of course, that catastrophe is inevitable. There is a chance that climate change will occur more slowly. There's a chance that human technology will limit or even eliminate its effects. It's just that there are a lot of very smart people who know a lot about climate change who think we are making the world irreversibly hotter.

John is waiting for me to respond to his point in our tiny argument, and I do: "look, I'm just saying all motion is relative - that's a basic principle of physics - so both sinking cities or rising water levels are correct." It's a dumb point in a dumb argument. At the end of the day, whether the water is rising or we are sinking, we will all still be in deep - and might I add hot - water.

Bio

Writer, Editor, Journalist, Media/Ad/Market Researcher, IT Consultant, from StRatford, Canada, who moved to Hong Kong, China, in 1990, to Ho Chi Minh City (ex/or SaiGon), Vietnam, in '94 -- just another a SighGone Hộ, i s'pose.